New Print Really Gaining Momentum

OMG Posters

Postcards from Colorado

Automatism

Happy Mundane

The Scoop

Twentytwo blog

Also : Design Milk , Design for Mankind; This Week in Inspiration

There are already a few less available than when I posted the print on Monday. You can get your own here.

Bosse Sudenburg

I found this image of Bosse Sudenburg's work at ArtFagCity and I find them fascinating. Here's a couple more photos from Galerie Metro.

Bosse Sudenburg | IF THEN | 2009 | Lightbox | 167×120x15 cm

Bosse Sudenburg | No 2nd Thoughts / East Coast West Coast | 2009 | Installation | 250×250x100 cm

Zbigniew Libera - La Vue

ZBIGNIEW LIBERA, La Vue, 2004-2006
series of 9 color photographs, 100 x 150 cm eacha

"Series of photographs taken with a traditional, analogue camera with macro lens. It depicts images, almost like abstract landscapes, created between the pages of glossy magazines or photo albums." - see the entire series at Raster gallery

Music for Your Studio: Volume 3

DJ Dert has put up several so-called "beat-tape" albums including one that remixes Jose Gonzalez (that one's for you Alan) into laid back mostly-instrumental beats. Go to his myspace page where he has them up for free - click on the album cover and it will take you to a site to download them...Also - Wixel just posted his album for February called "Clouds". He is embarkign on a very ambitions project - making a album every month this year and releasing the physical copies in the form of hand-stamped/hand-packaged limited editions. The albums are also available here as a free download from the artist. His record label site says it specializes in "music to fall asleep to" - also great for reading or studying.

I'm keeping this 'Music for Your Studio' thing going -because I love music and I'm amazed at the quantity (and quality) of free and legal albums out there that are worth listening to.

Slawek Elsner

Slawek Elsner

Windows on the World, Colored Pencil on Paper, 66x43", 2008

270 Kilotons, colour pencil on paper, 64 x 82,5 cm

My country 4, 2007, colour pencil on paper, 100 x 165 cmMy country 4 (detail), 2007, colour pencil on paper, 100 x 165 cm

Slawek Elsner, Raster Gallery, 2007

New Print Available - "Two Roofs" by Nathan Abels

I am pleased to announce that there is a new print of my work available now through POVevolving. I can personally attest to the quality of this print. It's printed on thick, high-quality Crane Museo Max 365gsm paper using archival pigmented inks. Each print comes with a signed and numbered certificate of authenticity - signed by yours truly. The image size is 7.5x7.5" and there is a white border to allow for framing. There are only 50 in the edition, and they're priced very affordably ($39) so get one while they last.

Axel Geis

Axel Geis

Ambient Video Podcast: The Snowflake Series

The Windows Exchange presents the Snowflake Series -ambient video for your portable device. These are brief little vignettes for a one minute vacation from your daily life.

itunes podcast feed. zune podcast feed.

Follow Up: Jaguars in Arizona

I posted on February 26th about a wild Jaguar caught in Arizona named Macho B...well on March 3rd, National Geographic wrote that Macho B had been put down after finding severe kidney failure in the old cat. RIP Macho B.

Photo of the Day: Nicholas Gottlund

Nicholas Gottlund

Shipwreck Art

For some reason, I get a lot of hits on this blog for a couple of posts about shipwreck paintings. Go figure. So here's where I pander to the masses. I love these recent paintings by Nadia Hebson. There's also a great old engraving I scanned, and loads of shipwreck paintings from the 1800s when ships were plunging like the current Nasdaq standings...

Nadia Hebson, Wreck, Oil on Canvas, 60x50 cm, 2005

Nadia Hebson, Valser, 175x190 cm, Oil on Canvas, 2007Joseph Cornell, "Jack's Dream" ca 1930- from theartofmemory

Old book page scanned from the collection of Nathan Abels

Paul Jean Clays, 1853- photo by flickr member Zeldenrust

Thomas Doughty, Shipwreck, 1834 - photo by flickr member mharrsch

Aivasovsky Ivan Constantinovich, Moonlit Seascape With Shipwreck - from wikicommons

Aivasovsky Ivan Constantinovich, Storm, 1872 - from wikicommons

Kenny Komer, "Shipwreck"
Caspar David Friedrich, Seashore with Shipwreck by Moonlight, 1825-1830 - photo from wikicommons
Caspar David Friedrich, Sea of Ice, 1823-1824 - from wikicommons

photo by flickr member tgtsfkncld

Cai Guo-Qiang, "Reflection" - photo by ThisWeekinNewYork on flickr.

Also - see this post of Joshua Tonies shipwreck paintings.

Sarah McKenzie at 20x200

Sarah McKenzie, "Lift"

Sarah McKenzie, "Support"

My good friend, Boulder artist Sarah McKenzie has two prints up right now at 20x200 - both of which are available in editions of various sizes and quantities for as little as $20 and as much as $200. The more expensive prints are in smaller editions and are a much larger size physically (16x20"). She also has a show up at Jen Bekman's gallery in NY called "Building Code." These are limited editioned archival quality prints at recession-friendly prices - so don't miss it.

Sarah's portfolio website is also quite impressive. She did some amazing aerial housing development paintings before I moved here and explored similar subject matter.

A Pair

Christoph Schmidberger, Suddenly I Felt Better Than Ever, 2006

August #4, by flickr member goldsardine

found here.

Music for Your Studio Vol. 2

The Depreciation Guild make my kind of music. Their sound combines vintage 8-bit (ala Nintendo) synth sounds with fuzzed-out shoegazer guitars (think Radio Dept. or Slowdive - their singer actually plays drums for the Pains of Being Pure at Heart). Their album is also free and legal and well worth the download. I think the retro goofiness of the 8-bit sounds are well balanced with the soft, distorted guitars. You can find their first ep here (also free and legal!).

I'm going to keep this "music for your studio" thing going on Wednesdays - so I'll try to switch up the genres. This is really good. Have a listen:

Hopperesque

There's a flickr pool of all photography dedicated to or reminiscent of the painter Edward Hopper called Hopperesque. I culled a few choice images to share with you:

Gateway Nightwawk, by flickr member Briggate.com

so you had to cross the sea, by flickr member marco welt

l'abbraccio, by flickr member loungerie

by flickr member eman59

"The Stranger In Her Room", by flickr member pixyliao

Coyote "Hazing"

Beautiful photo by flickr users Carly&Art

Last week Christopher N. Osher of the Denver Post wrote, "Denver parks officials say killing and trapping are ineffective approaches to nuisance coyotes and they plan instead to educate the public to start "hazing" the animals....Targeted mailings have gone out to neighborhoods of southeast Denver telling residents to "haze" coyotes by making loud noises and threatening gestures when they see them."

New Press

Nathan Abels: Expatriate

By Dan Swartz

Fort Wayne Reader

2009-02-24

Employing the most of the unnoticed everyday icons of life through the eyes of a Midwesterner, visual artist Nathan Abels has created a very strong body of art, and gained great levels of success. Abels, a Fort Wayne native and University of Saint Francis BA graduate, earned an MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in 2005 and is currently living in Denver, Colorado, represented there by Rule Gallery. Rule Gallery is a well-established contemporary art gallery, which shows national and emerging regional artists. While very much enjoying his relationship with Rule gallery, Abels would also like to expand his market to galleries outside of Colorado, and in addition to this Abels plans on increasing the scale of his works, while also doing more works on paper.

“My work is primarily landscape-based representational painting, mostly having to do with the human habitat,” Abels says. “Since moving to Denver two years ago I did some work as an aerial survey photographer that crept into my works about the suburban landscape. My most recent show Stills took place at the Rule Gallery here in Denver and just closed. This show consisted of nine works that were less directly suburban-based and more diverse visually and with added atmosphere.

Nathan Abels’ work has evolved since finishing graduate school, but has stayed very true to the conceptual and historical threads of landscape paintings, post-neo-expressionist painting, and minimalism (some of his favorite artists are Otis Redding, Edward Hopper, Toba Kedoori, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Vija Celmins). The themes have consistently been space and place related. Open spaces, quiet places, and a sense of uneasiness and mysterious origins permeate his images, be they of houses based off of aerial photographs, or a lone burning barrel at night. When asked about the quietness of his images, Abels said, “Everything else is noisy enough. I suppose my work acts as some kind of balance. In a lot of ways I think I can make work more real or honest when it is quieter.”

While each image tends to lack an obvious narrative, the work, especially when viewed en masse creates a very palpable, almost seething sense of loneliness, folly, and wonder. I tend to think of Abels’ work as being very complicated temporally. His paintings especially evoke 19th century Whistler-like images, early 20th century Regionalists like Grant Wood and Andrew Wyeth, and share many commonalities with low and high millennial artists like Ross Bleckner (including the beautiful piece entitled “Without Haste, But Without Rest”), Luc Tuymans, and others.

“Somnambulism”, another very Ross Bleckner-esque, smart, smoky, virtuoso painting that is modestly sized, and tightly cropped. The image is of a smokestack, which can be seen through the links of a chain fence. “Somnambulism” means sleepwalking and the image like much of Abels’ work is based on an initial photograph, this one being a Polaroid taken by a friend of his. “It had all the things I liked in it – repetition, muted colors, environmental concerns (with the smokestack), and contrasts of organic and man-made forms (there is a faint tree branch at the top – easier seen in person).” This painting differs from much of Abel’s older work, which relied much more on a refined sense and use of color, although still muted. The intense cropping places the image, conceptually, in a photographic context and creates a sense of voyeurism. The viewer of “Somnambulism” takes on the more literal role of the viewer in the image, giving this painting much more depth and character than the formally simple image allows alone.
"Nothing is Fair or Good Alone" is another Abels painting representative of his newer work with a darker palette complimenting his natural creation of spacious environments. “The painting is of a small barrel with a fire in it. I was thinking of my Grandparents who used to burn a lot of leaves in barrels out in Leo and it also reminded me of cookouts we used to have in Savannah. I think the title can refer to the positive and negative effects that any action may have in relation to other actions or inactions. For example, wildfires are a constant threat in the arid climate here in Colorado– but fire is the only way some kinds of pine trees can regenerate.”

“Untitled”, a great example of Abels’ ability to reproduce images, nearly mechanically, is a work of graphite on paper. This is one of many images of homes entitled “Untitled” relaying even further the monotony of suburban sprawl that has taken a stranglehold over most major cities in the United States. Through these images, and upon further inspection, many of his paintings, Abels has mastered the vignette, giving a faintly bordered glimpse of what is sure to be a sea of grayish blue and beige boxes being constructed throughout the Colorado landscape. Abels’ ability to replicate such exacting details, and his access to aerial views through his job create these almost toy box looking subdivisions, all ignorant of each other, while being nearly identical.

Because of Nathan Abels’ extraordinary talent and good business head, his work is already part of prominent collections throughout the United States, including New York City, and his work has been seen in numerous contemporary art galleries and art fairs. At 28 years of age, Abels’ is right on track to have a very nice career, being that a general rule of thumb is “representation at 30, museums by 40, making money in your 50’s, and retrospectives soon after”. Hopefully Fort Wayne will be lucky enough to see more of Nathan Abels work in the future, and we can revel in the gorgeous works of one of our expatriate artists.

You can find more images and information on Nathan Abels by visiting Rule Gallery (www.rulegallery.com), or the artist’s personal website (www.nathanabels.com).